The Ghost Map: A Street, An Epidemic and the Hidden Power of Urban Networks

by Steven Johnson

Squatter cities lack most of the infrastructure and creature comforts of developed metropolitan life, but they are nonetheless spaces of dynamic economic innovation and creativity. Some of the oldest shantytown developments—the Rocinha area in Rio de Janeiro, Squatter Colony in Mumbai—have already matured into fully functioning urban areas with most of the comforts we’ve come to expect in the developed world: improvised wood shacks giving way to steel and concrete; electricity; running water; even cable television. The main road in the squatter village of Sultaneyli in Istanbul is lined with six-story buildings, bustling with the commerce of ordinary city life: banks, restaurants, shops. And all of this has been accomplished without title deeds, without urban planners, without government-created civic infrastructure, on land that it is, technically speaking, illegally occupied. The squatter communities are not, by any measure, sinkholes of poverty and crime. They are where the developing world goes to get out of poverty.